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 Back To Viral Video Index PAGE 2 Palette and Plans I laid out a palette to represent the narrative element in the music. I decided to represent normal life (and particularily their lives as art students) with solo piano compositions. As the film progresses, both the characters in the story and the movie itself become more like the traditional Gang. Most every Gang Entertainment movie is scored with either symphonic soundtrack taken from one of a relatively very small group of films, or videogame music. This movie was made slightly differently though. The actors (playing themselves) have had their memories erased and cannot remember how to make movies like their old movies, and in turn, this movie starts off in a quite different fashion than one of their old movies. It's made much more like a pretentious art film that one of their characters would make. In the story, as they gradually gain back what they had lost, the production of this movie itself begins to return to their original style. I wanted the music to outline and drive the narrative, as well as possible, and show how close the movie is at any given time to being a traditional Gang movie. Because I would be using a sample library (which at times does not sound good, particularily while playing fast passages) and because of the music that all of the members of the production team (and target audience) were interested in, I decided to model a large amount of the music off of videogames. Videogame music was originally created on very low quality sound engines and relied heavily on the compositions to drive it, as the synthesizers were not very expressive in themselves. As the music evolved over time, the original style of writing (which was started out of neccesity) was continued in a lineage that still exists in videogame music today (despite that the quality has now improved to allow for any style of writing, or using real musicians and instruments.) I thought a good example of this was the soundtrack to Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which features many of the compositions from the original videogame, but redone with wider instrumentations. And it seemed that everybody involved in any aspect of this movie was obsessed with the soundtrack as equally as I was, so I used it a model for the way the soundtrack would function; relying mainly on composition rather than instrumental expression. This brings up another point, which is that for this project I consciously chose to allow myself to be directly influneced by individual songs or pieces I've previously encountered. I've never done this before, simply because the usual focus of my creative energy involves coming up with something that hasn't ever been heard before. But I felt for this soundtrack that I had a certain responsibility to the lineage of the Gang's previous movies and not just give them a new Brian Peters Solo Record to put over their movie. I also thought it would be really fun to leave my usual world of working methods and try something different. It actually turned out to be a lot of fun, drastically rearranging my creative process, and despite this as well as the aesthetic instrumentation and arrangement differences, the soundtrack ended up sounding like me anyways. Running adjacent to the spectrum of piano to symphonic music were a few other general instrumentation choices. I decided that a rock band would represent the Gang successfully fighting their way through opposition and achieving a general state of awesomeness. I wanted this to reach an apex of idiocy/awesomeness during the final Rex battle, so I decided dueling guitar solos would be an appropriate representation of this. During a conversation with Tyler Ventura, we both came up with the idea to have one of the dueling guitars as Tyler actually singing the guitar soloing part against me playing a real guitar. When we went to record it, however, it felt cooler for us to both be singing, and thus, Power Reality Guitar Soloing was born. For obvious reasons, this seemed a perfect marriage between music and the story at that point in the movie. I thought, if the classic Gang is being represented by symphony orchestra, what would the Elders, a group determined to destroy The Gang, be represented by? I tried to think of what, in a musical sense, has tried to destroy/overrun/antiquate symphonic music, and suddenly one thing came to mind. The synthesizer replacement of classical music that was first done by Wendy Carlos in her 1968 album, "Switched On Bach", which recreated J.S. Bach pieces using only multiple takes of Moog synthesizers. She is also known for her soundtrack to the film, "A Clockwork Orange". So, I decided that the Council of Elders would be represented by analog (sounding) synthesizers, and their theme itself would consist almost exclusively of these synthesizers. This ended up working out pretty well, aesthetically, both because synthesizers are pretty soul-less and because of the appropriate and contrasting type of videogame feel it gave to the Elders scenes, which became immediately unique and recognizable throughout the movie. Individual instrumentation choices were also made for the movie. I wanted to limit the amount of piano in parts of the movie which were hardly "normal life" in any way, and with synthesizers being already designated for things pertaining to the Elders, I needed an instrument to play piano-like parts in the movie (since the symphonic sample libraries would fail miserably at recreating many types of passages, severely limiting my use of countless musical ideas). I decided to utilize harp and celesta as the "fantasy" versions of the piano, as they have a very "fantasy" sound to them anyways. I chose a unifying element for the entire score, which would also serve as the "viral video" element. The first thing I scored for the movie was the viral video to which the title refers, the Booshe Fighters video. For that cue, I decided (fittingly enough) to use Google to find some widespread internet electronic percussion "loops" for the song and small score preceding it. These loops exist somewhat unaltered in the Booshe Fighters song, but appear throughout the movie (sonically destroyed and half erased) which I thought would represent their erased memories/stupidity and forgotten "booshing" skills, as well as their pursuit and need to rekindle these things. This inner desire, being the driving force for the progression of the story, would provide, in my sonic representation, the driving percussion for the rest of the movie. I created two choir sounds, one that was made from samples of real voices, which was used during sections where Tyler, Joey, and Mike realize or are considering what happened or is happening to them because of the Elders, and the other choir sound (featured in the Elders scenes) that consists of synthesized voices, which I felt represented how Tyler, Joey, and Mike appear to the Elders, as simple numbers and figures that need to be squelched without any human regard. I made this breathy drone sound to represent Terry's unwanted appearance in their lives, because, I guess it sounded cool. Snare drum represents Rex's business, while low brass represented his intentions. I tried not to implement any of these objective choices if their actual emotional effect didn't match the scene, which was the most important thing, but luckily in almost every case, the emotion and metaphor matched. Especially because of the nature of the cuts and suspecting Mike might find it irresistible to make his own "post-scoring" edits to the film (which he did) I decided to do the entire thing in A minor to make things easier on everybody involved. Most of the movie ended up in A minor except for two things; the Booshe Fighters music and the entire confrontation with Rex, which are both intentionally a whole step higher, in B minor. I originally decided this for two reasons, one of them is that B minor is a great key for heavy metal guitar, if you're using a metal drop B guitar tuning, as I planned to... the other, also being the reason I was using guitar in those two cues, is that I wanted them to both represent the fighting success I mentioned earlier, in a sort of elevated state of existance, a whole step above normal existance apparently. What I totally lucked out on was that I decided I wanted the power reality transformations, with the masks, to be in B Lydian, which is what gives it a sort of magical uplifting feeling, and the NEDM music (which wasn't in the script) turned out to be in D# Aeolian, which is the same key as B Lydian, and fit without any adjustments. There was only a 1 in 12 chance that it would have worked out like that, but it did, and I didn't have to change anything. Mike also mentioned to me that he was a very large fan of "thematic" elements in his movies, as am I, so I didn't hold back on introducing them where I could in the limited time I had to write the cues (in most cases, about 1 or 2 hours, since I then had to orchestrate, arrange, track/program, edit, mix, and master them, in most cases, within one day.) I will mention these in the notes for each applicable track in the order they appear on the soundtrack, which is very close to the order in which they appear in the movie. |